It would have been nice to have an nVidia option, you need nVidia for certain tasks.
Is it possible to do SMART over any external device save for maybe eSATA?

Given that Thunderbolt is PCIe, I think it could support SMART because it would be a SATA chip on PCIe.

That said, the number of times SMART saved my bacon on any computer was zero.

Same experience with SMART. It will only detect mechanical failure, and typically only at the brink of destruction if at all. The metadata can be somewhat helpful, but that requires a third party app to view in OSX. I'm not sure about Windows on that one. I would have preferred NVidia as CUDA is still a better match for certain things. It appears to have a lot of thunderbolt ports relative to the number of devices out for thunderbolt. I've indicated before that I think thunderbolt was designed with notebooks in mind. It's designed for form factors where things won't fit internally. Given the ratio of notebook to desktop sales and that Apple has some seemingly popular $2k+ notebooks, I would have expected them to be the real driver in thunderbolt sales. They definitely kicked the specs up though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by elliots11

I think we're going to see upgraded graphics cards done externally through Thunderbolt 2 which is why they decided to debut it here. Just my theory.
Apple has historically been trying to keep people from tinkering inside its machines, so by releasing basically a badass Mac Mini with a way to add on externally what you previously would have internally... well that's about par for the course.
You can't tinker with the insides, but you can add on more powerful attachments so it's flexible. Fine by me as long as I'm right on this. I have a videocard that would never fit into that little case.

I'm highly skeptical of that. Notebooks have the most to gain, unless manufacturers feel that the next generation provides adequate bandwidth. If everything made sense there, including price, the companies that released a 680 and 7970 for Mac would have also released thunderbolt versions to maximize the sales potential of those cards.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nht

Doesn't matter when there are known driver issues with the FirePro and some pro apps that AMD is aware of and haven't fixed (ArcGIS, Autodesk, even some issues in CS) but work perfectly fine on the Quadro. And anyone that does CUDA is also now screwed.

Windows drivers do tend to be different than OSX ones. For example the Quadro 4000 had kernel panic issues with its early drivers. I agree with you on CUDA. Some things where this machine would be used just don't work with OpenCL. I'll reserve judgement somewhat on the use of thunderbolt for everything, but I'm skeptical that the mac pro would drive adoption where other machines have yet. If it's an issue of a stable thunderbolt spec, that would make more sense.

Huh? He just misspoke. They were ALL pretty nervous up there for some reason. Don't know why; they succeeded phenomenally.

It probably started with the race cars and the little issue they had getting going. Honestly though I'm not sure if it was nervousness or excitement. When he got to the Mac Pro you could almost feel the excitement. This is obviously something they have been working on for some time now so they likely where charged up so to speak. This is a revolutionary machine and as such they probably have been excited about it for months now.

Quote:

Meanwhile, OS X refuses to support modern OpenGL…

Mavericks is supposedly taking care of this. It had better.

I was a bit disappointed that they didn't go into Mavericks a little deeper. There appears to be a huge amount of innovation in this Mac OS release that nobody will notice. In fact Mavericks could end up selling even more Mac Books of various types. It doesn't look like MS has anything close to the power saving technologies that Mavericks has.

Quote:

The last one was portable, too. I literally carry mine around from place to place when I have to work to move.

60 lbs. does great stuff to your upper body.

I really think this is a machine that will grow on people over time. I'm not sure why so many expected a machine built like the Mac Pro of today. While I wasn't expecting Mac Tube and this specific configuration I was expecting a much smaller platform focused on modern technology. I kinda see this like the first MB Airs. It introduces an entirely new concept that at first has some rough spots. Eventually like the Air this machine will morph into something thoroughly modern.

It looks like a fun and capable upscale consumer computer. Big upgrade from a mini or an iMac, for sure.

HUGE downgrade from a Mac Pro though. This will further send more audio and video professionals away from the Mac.

I really wish somebody would explain how this can be a downgrade. You will have 7 TeraFlops of performance through the GPUs', what current Mac Pro can do this? Your through put to RAM doubles which is nothing to sneeze at either. Everything about this design indicates huge increase in performance over previous designs, so how is that not "pro". The only real issue is the lack of internal PCI-Express slots which is of concern to only a tiny portion of Mac Pro users. Eventually those slot users will have to upgrade anyways.

Frankly I think you have it all wrong, I would expect true professionals to see this platform for what it is. That is a very high performance computational node.

All this talk of external expansion being the future makes me think of this old ad:

But the future is the future. I just hope that all these wonderful external devices will last for at least a few generations of hardware upgrades.

Flaw in this picture is that the MacPro is not marketed as an All-in-One, nor it is even a consumer-level machine like the Dell in this photo. The Mac Pro was always about function not form, and more liberal expansion options. Things that required extra cables.

I'm not passing a judgment on a not shipping computer just yet (especially since something else might pop out in the meantime) but the pro audio and video boards I frequent are having a field day to this effect.

Probably the same idiots that panned the FCP update. Which by the way might sell a lot of these machines once they optimize FCP for the new Mac Pro.

Actually this is a real concern, the entry point for the Mac Pro really doesn't need to go higher.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rezwits

I am scared tho... don't be scared - ICP

It's just that... this thing man Damn, I hate to say things like this but were talking $10,000 or minimum $5,000, THE LOWEST CONFIG, $4999.99

Seriously, Look at those parts

The 1 TB SSD PCIE 3.0? $#!+ Thats, like $1,500

It is probably Apples own controller. I wouldn't be surprised if they can get that sort of storage into the Mac Pro for under $500. Of course what they want to charge the buyer for that storage is another thing. in any event there is a lot of room for the cost of flash storage to come down.

Quote:

Two Video Cards, what's that without looking? $2,000? or $1,000

This is actually most interesting. These aren't standard card obviously. The thing here is that the chips will be soon replaced in the market with new revisions. I could see each card going into the machine for less than $500.

Quote:

Ram there's another $1,000

Err no not really

Quote:

PROCS minimum $1,500 a piece x2 = $3,000

The way I understand it there is only one chip

Quote:

That's $7Gs right there, and we're not even talking about Case, Motherboard, or Thunderbolt (pieces)

I'm actually thinking around $3000. Like you the rest also will cost money. It really depends upon what sort of deals Apple can cut with suppliers, especially AMD and the GPU boards. I suspect the potential is there for dramatic savings over a regular PCI Express card.

No, I'm in Hollywood working in theatrical and broadcast design. Last thing I want is a 1970s ashtray on my desk with a bunch of cables hanging out of it. Then not being able to upgrade the graphics card? Apple loves prosumers, hates professionals.

You are simply full of yourself. Once video professionals grasp what is in this machine they will be falling all over themselves to buy one. In the end upgrading video cards is becoming a thing of the past because the payoff isn't there anymore.

And now we just might be seeing how Apple really is going to kill the Mac Pro line. :)

Truth is, what's the difference between this and an iMac at this point, other than you don't get a built in display? Seriously. There's nothing in this box that couldn't be built into an (albeit thicker) iMac.

I don't know entirely, but I am thinking, as much as guys have been crying about SLI on the PC side, two big GPUs and a 1 TB RAM disk is pretty fly. The other thing to think about is that the 12 core is a new step, because Apple maybe saying lets get rid of two PROCs and only do 1 and not worry about messing with two processors anymore. Because really what is a 12 core chip? Two 6 core Chips. Here is the real upside, if they use the weird ones (chips) that have 2 extras virtual threads or something like that, we're talking 36 Threads!! That's quite a bit of a jump from mac-mini Quad-core with 8 Threads...

Note to Pros: save up and invest in the future. This is once again the future of computing staring you in the face, and you just don't have the vision to see it. The traditional tower workstation is dead. As with the death of the floppy, the first to implement USB, networking out of the box, wifi, touch computing... Apple is showing the way towards the next decade in computing.

Yah, this is a very awesome Mac Mini Pro. The size is pretty decent for that as well.

There's going to be a lot of pros wondering what the difference between this and an iMac is if they have to buy an external PCIe chassis for any of the cards they are using. Sure performance will be faster than the iMac but given that the current iMac is faster than the old Mac Pro and the 2013 Haswell iMacs will be faster still that performance gap isn't likely to be 2x.

Funny enough, in a previous post I (and along with some others) predicted this kind of "mini pro" design with the multiple TB ports, and I also mentioned how this doesn't solve the GPU upgrade problem.

But to be fair, GPU's haven't improved in the last 3 generations. A Radeon 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx and 8xxx part is barely any faster then the previous part it replaced. In fact going from a 5750 to a 7770 resulted in a slight downgrade. So it may be fair to say that the energy use has gone down, allowing for the kind of design Apple has put out there.

The internal storage really is a non-issue. I pretty much nailed it where the OS drive (on a SSD) will be in the system, and a ratsnest of cables will be required. It solves one upgrade problem (by putting the drives in a separate enclosure, and thereby not having to migrate every time you change the core system.)

I'll wait till someone does a tear-down of it before considering buying it though. This is pretty much the G4 cube revived as a cylinder. It's an art piece, but it lacks rack-mountability and as far as we know, GPU upgrade ability. So this will likely be sufficient for most professionals who need a Photo/Video/CAD machine but will be woefully inadequate where OS X is being used as a server for the same reasons the Mac Mini doesn't make a good server.

I kinda expect Apple did this, and will later go "oh look, not many people buy Mac Pros, let's discontinue it", when really the people who needed a "Mac Pro" for the last 3 years hung onto the previous generation model were those who an iMac/Mac Mini were never viable upgrades to begin with. Optimistically I hope someone figures out how to connect 3 TB 2 ports to an external GPU to get the full 16 lanes.

Forward thinking sums it up. Too many are dwelling on what they know from the past. to those I urge sitting back and taking a deep breath and really think hard about what Apple has here. This is one nice machine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apple ][

I probably won't be getting one of these new Mac Pros right now, simply because I'm pretty sure that the cost will be far more than I am willing to budget for a computer at the moment, but damn, this is one sweet machine!

Isn't it funny how people have been whining for ages about the Mac Pro? When is the new one coming out! Apple doesn't innovate anymore! Blah Blah, fucking Blah.

And now that Apple releases a truly innovative design that looks like no Mac before it, that's 1/8 the size of the previous machine, out come the whiners, with their endless whining! These people are truly old fashioned and they're better off building their own PC, so that they can get exactly the machine that is made for them. And hopefully they won't have to whine anymore, since Apple has apparently innovated too much and taken too much of a leap. A leap that is guaranteed to confuse certain people who are not forward thinking.

Have all the "external-only expansion is better" crowd thought about what they are going to do with all the extra enclosures, cables, power bricks, cooling fans, and noise that they are going to start collecting?

And by the way, does each of those Thunderbolt connectors get its own dedicated 20 Gbps bandwidth, or is it all shared?

The other thing to think about is that the 12 core is a new step, because Apple maybe saying lets get rid of two PROCs and only do 1 and not worry about messing with two processors anymore. Because really what is a 12 core chip? Two 6 core Chips. Here is the real upside, if they use the weird ones (chips) that have 2 extras virtual threads or something like that, we're talking 36 Threads!!

Whatcha been smoking?

The new design is still dual processor (6 cores each), just like the old design. HyperThreads will double the max. number of active threads to 24 total per complete system.

Dual-processor capable Sandy Bridge Xeons with 8 cores have been available for months already, to get 32 threads per system. 8 and 16 DIMM slot motherboards for these chips are commonplace, compared to just 4 slots in the new Mac Pro.

For all those upset about the lack of optical drive, I question - why do you need one? I personally am in the market of content creation, I am a filmmaker. Do I need DVD/Blu-Ray replication services? You bet. Most replication services who are "with it" will accept thumb drives. They are getting cheap enough that you can buy them in bulk and need not worry about getting them returned. Remember the days of zip disks or am I aging myself?

This is a good question. We can only hope that Apple has some really good deal lined up and lower end configurations in store. I can easily see $3500 if Apple goes after the high end only. I could however see a $1500 variant.

It is fairly easy to get a grip on the price of the Intel chip, if we knew what it was, but the GPUs will be very interesting indeed. They might cost Apple anywhere from $250 to $1200 per board. It is interesting but on line the spec "up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM" which obviously implies options. Further there are a number of FirePro chips that could potential be going into the GPU boards.

in a nut shell it is hard to tell and likely will vary greatly in price based on the actual configuration. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see one come in at under $1500. Apple uses the phrase "up to" many times in the online marketing piece. People could be surprised in a very positive way with the pricing.

I guess I wasn't too clear as this is the second post that mistook my intentions. It isn't the *footprint* that I'm concerned about (the new Mac Pro is far smaller than the previous generation). The problem is that it won't fit well in corners, up against other equipment (like the expansion boxes you'll need), etc.

I'm sure someone will make a square pedestal base so it'll fit next to your equipment snugly.

On a more positive thought, do you suppose an updated mini could be built around the same basic concept. Smaller, to be sure, but using the same airflow and basic internal layout. Give it the same SSD as the Air. Would be pretty slick, actually.

It could be but probably won't happen. I would expect the Mini to retain its current size. However a good PCI-Express based SSD would go very nicely into a Mini.

I'll throw my hat into the ring as one of Pro folks who is extremely disappointed in the new Mac Pro. No internal expansion slots for additional NICs or RAM alone is a reason to dump Apple for Pro hardware.

Secondly, only gig ethernet??? What the hell? Where's the 10 gig ethernet???

Because there is only gig ethernet that means all storage expansion will have to be Thunderbolt... BLAH, YUCK! Centralized storage is where it's at! NAS and SAN dominate for on premise storage. No Fiber Channel at all, and only a 1 gig iSCSI connection???

B.S. if you ask me. Terrible. Might as well just buy an iMac... I don't see the value add of a Mac Pro over an iMac anymore. This sucks

Anybody that doesn't understand how powerful this machine is, needs to take a computer technology class or something. This is an extremely powerful machine. So much so in fact that I worry about the entry level price.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bergermeister

The bashers are out in force around the net. Some even claim to be "pros".

Apple LED Cinema Display is finally going to be dropped from the (online) Apple Store, as all Macs have Thunderbolt ports now. I wonder if Apple is going to introduce an Apple 4K Display in the fall. There could be a “pro” event, where they could release the Mac Pro and also introduce new Retina MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt 2. That would be a perfect moment to introduce Apple 4K Display (since 4K cannot work over Thunderbolt 1).

Funny enough, in a previous post I (and along with some others) predicted this kind of "mini pro" design with the multiple TB ports, and I also mentioned how this doesn't solve the GPU upgrade problem.

But to be fair, GPU's haven't improved in the last 3 generations. A Radeon 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx and 8xxx part is barely any faster then the previous part it replaced. In fact going from a 5750 to a 7770 resulted in a slight downgrade. So it may be fair to say that the energy use has gone down, allowing for the kind of design Apple has put out there.

The internal storage really is a non-issue. I pretty much nailed it where the OS drive (on a SSD) will be in the system, and a ratsnest of cables will be required. It solves one upgrade problem (by putting the drives in a separate enclosure, and thereby not having to migrate every time you change the core system.)

I'll wait till someone does a tear-down of it before considering buying it though. This is pretty much the G4 cube revived as a cylinder. It's an art piece, but it lacks rack-mountability and as far as we know, GPU upgrade ability. So this will likely be sufficient for most professionals who need a Photo/Video/CAD machine but will be woefully inadequate where OS X is being used as a server for the same reasons the Mac Mini doesn't make a good server.

I kinda expect Apple did this, and will later go "oh look, not many people buy Mac Pros, let's discontinue it", when really the people who needed a "Mac Pro" for the last 3 years hung onto the previous generation model were those who an iMac/Mac Mini were never viable upgrades to begin with. Optimistically I hope someone figures out how to connect 3 TB 2 ports to an external GPU to get the full 16 lanes.

I think GPU upgrade days are over right? I mean do you know how hard it's going to be to couple THUNDERBOLT with GPUs from here on out? That was probably one the major problems. I wouldn't doubt, if this thing could drive 6 1080p displays, with thunderbolt and hdmi, this is serious junction in computing. I just can't figure out which one is the Ferrari and which one is the CAT Truck. The GPUs are the Ferrari and the Truck is the CPU? or the other way around. Cause to me a CPU halls ass down the street really fast, and GPUs move earth and rock in the form of 3D objects... but it's the best of both worlds either way, being able to Tow 16 Tons, and then being able to go 200 mph!!

This was not the Mac Pro I was hoping for. I like upgradability and tinkering and the Mac Pro was the very last Mac that allowed you to do that. This new one looks like they have closed the loophole. It seems Apple just doesn't want us to get inside or change anything on a Mac Pro or any Apple device for that matter.

Correct. The purpose of this design was to make a cool looking disposable computer. It will be very powerful when you first buy it, but 2-3 years down the line it will need to be replaced. Consumer-level Apple users seemed to have accepted this idea, the question is will professionals be just as gullible? We will see.

-kpluck

Do you use MagicJack?

The default settings will automatically charge your credit card each year for service renewal. You will not be notified or warned in anyway. You can turn auto renewal off.

I'm not knocking the GPGPUs installed. I like them. I don't expect most folks want to pay for $3k worth of CAD/CAM intensive GPGPUs when the AMD 8000s coming out would have done just as well. I would have preferred an expansion for a daughter card configuration that I can plug n' play GPGPUs as add-ons or swap them out when not using this for Engineering Applications.

How this base system is < $6k is anyone's guess.

Actually I'm concerned about what the price might be also. However we really don't know what sort of deal has been worked out here. In the online documents Apple uses the phrase "up to" many times so I'm not sure what we can expect as to the cost of the GPU's. I could see this machine being priced very aggressively using an older rev FirePro chip with the high end machine using the state of the art solution.

As for engineering applications that is more a case of the drivers than the chip. I fully expect the GPU's to work just as well as any other GPU with Apple software. Further I'm hoping that this is a sign that the OpenGL 4 release in Maverick is a very high quality implementation.

In any event I'm very positive about this years WWDC. Lots of great news.

Correct. The purpose of this design was to make a cool looking disposable computer. It will be very powerful when you first buy it, but 2-3 years down the line it will need to be replaced. Consumer-level Apple users seemed to have accepted this idea, the question is will professionals be just as gullible? We will see.

-kpluck

Yeah but the way this is going you're probably going to be starting at a 256 GB RAM DISK PCIe 3.0, which you will upgrade later, to 512 or even 1024 GB, easily pop out chip put in another. If it's supports 64 GB of RAM, you are looking at 16GB chip for starters and popping in another 16GB chip and another and another. I hear the processor is upgradeable too. The GPUs no. :( That's pretty cool upgrading... but you want what? umm... Fibre Card? TBolt2... umm? what else? Hard drives? I'd rather just get an external 8 TB TBolt array...

Funny enough, in a previous post I (and along with some others) predicted this kind of "mini pro" design with the multiple TB ports, and I also mentioned how this doesn't solve the GPU upgrade problem.

GPU upgrades are a thing of the past. People really should be thinking differently here. Either buy the right amount of GPU power in the beginning or don't complain.

Quote:

But to be fair, GPU's haven't improved in the last 3 generations. A Radeon 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx and 8xxx part is barely any faster then the previous part it replaced. In fact going from a 5750 to a 7770 resulted in a slight downgrade. So it may be fair to say that the energy use has gone down, allowing for the kind of design Apple has put out there.

Exactly. With todays hardware by the time you have significant GPU upgrade available as much as 5 years could have passed. In that time everything else will have changed around the GPU. You will benefit far more by doing complete system upgrades over longer periods of time.

Quote:

The internal storage really is a non-issue. I pretty much nailed it where the OS drive (on a SSD) will be in the system, and a ratsnest of cables will be required. It solves one upgrade problem (by putting the drives in a separate enclosure, and thereby not having to migrate every time you change the core system.)

It also puts the technology outside the box (tube) so that other people are responsible for it.

Quote:

I'll wait till someone does a tear-down of it before considering buying it though. This is pretty much the G4 cube revived as a cylinder. It's an art piece, but it lacks rack-mountability and as far as we know, GPU upgrade ability. So this will likely be sufficient for most professionals who need a Photo/Video/CAD machine but will be woefully inadequate where OS X is being used as a server for the same reasons the Mac Mini doesn't make a good server.

Well it is only rational to decide on what the final shipping product looks like. However this puts the G4 cube to shame and frankly isn't remotely comparable. Apple could screw this up just like they screwed up the G4 Cube by trying to ship if at an excessively high price. Pricing will make or break this machine.

Quote:

I kinda expect Apple did this, and will later go "oh look, not many people buy Mac Pros, let's discontinue it", when really the people who needed a "Mac Pro" for the last 3 years hung onto the previous generation model were those who an iMac/Mac Mini were never viable upgrades to begin with. Optimistically I hope someone figures out how to connect 3 TB 2 ports to an external GPU to get the full 16 lanes.

Baloney. You don''t spend as much time and effort, not to mention cash, to not expect success on something like this. This is a major design effort and probably cost Apple a bundle to develop. I don't have a crystal ball but even so I expect this computer to be a hot seller if it is priced right.

Have all the "external-only expansion is better" crowd thought about what they are going to do with all the extra enclosures, cables, power bricks, cooling fans, and noise that they are going to start collecting?

And by the way, does each of those Thunderbolt connectors get its own dedicated 20 Gbps bandwidth, or is it all shared?

You make assumptions here about how different professionals operate. Many have a network for bulk storage and in some places are required to use that network. Even is local bulk storage is needed this isn't any different than hooking an array up to any other machine.

Actually I'm concerned about what the price might be also. However we really don't know what sort of deal has been worked out here. In the online documents Apple uses the phrase "up to" many times so I'm not sure what we can expect as to the cost of the GPU's.

I suspect there will be four configurations, ranging from what they showed, down to a quad core, dual-low-end-GPU machine. I think the base entry price will be "affordable" -- something like $1,500-$1,700. There's a lot of engineering that went into this design which I think will lead to economies of scale down the road after it's been out for awhile, but means upfront capital costs to recoup.

While they showed the top of the line in the demo, naturally, I am happy to see this is a very scalable design that could easily support lower end machines. (the 6 TB ports, etc, comes with all so I don't think there will be a $999 option.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by kpluck
The purpose of this design was to make a cool looking disposable computer.

You mean like the current mac pro? You can't upgrade the CPU in the current machine, but you can upgrade storage and memory. The new machine you can upgrade storage and memory. The only real difference is in the old machine the GPU was upgradable, but you can still do that with the new machine, you just use an external GPU. Calling it "disposable" seems pretty silly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wizard69
Anybody that doesn't understand how powerful this machine is, needs to take a computer technology class or something. This is an extremely powerful machine. So much so in fact that I worry about the entry level price.

I've noticed that the people who complain about Apple not supporting the "professionals" seem to be extremely focused on upgrading their GPUs. I've never upgraded the GPU in the Mac Pros I've had, and never really needed to. Video editors, creative types, they don't need to upgrade GPUs every year.

Who does need to upgrade GPUs, or at least wants to? Kids who play a lot of video games. I think they are the ones complaining that it doesn't support "professionals" because it doesn't support their having-the-latest-gpu bragging habit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bbwi
I'll throw my hat into the ring as one of Pro folks who is extremely disappointed in the new Mac Pro. No internal expansion slots for additional NICs or RAM alone is a reason to dump Apple for Pro hardware.

Because there is only gig ethernet that means all storage expansion will have to be Thunderbolt... BLAH, YUCK! Centralized storage is where it's at! NAS and SAN dominate for on premise storage. No Fiber Channel at all, and only a 1 gig iSCSI connection???

B.S. if you ask me. Terrible. Might as well just buy an iMac... I don't see the value add of a Mac Pro over an iMac anymore. This sucks

You don't get it. Thunderbolt has made internal expansion slots obsolete. You're really worried about not being able to use a card slot for an additional NIC? A NIC that gives you, what, 10GB ethernet? You could hang 3-4 of those off of a single thunderbolt port without losing performance. (10GB Ethernet does at best 5GB of data x 4 = 20GB.)

I think it's hilarious that you'd rather have storage reachable over pokey ethernet than thunderbolt. I guess you haven't heaed but thunderbolt is a whole lot faster than ethernet, and is pretty ideal for talking to mass storage... which if it's really massive is pretty damns slow. If you're spinning rust, it's the drive where you lose performance, not the way oversized thunderbolt pipes going to it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Haggar

Have all the "external-only expansion is better" crowd thought about what they are going to do with all the extra enclosures, cables, power bricks, cooling fans, and noise that they are going to start collecting?

Yes. I have lived with quite a varied and shifting collection of external drives to deal with my video. First off, going from firewire to thunderbolt is a huge improvement. Secondly, as capacities increase you can replace the drive and keep the same enclosure... and I put the drives out of the way so there's not really much noise. While it's true the past MacPro had 4 internal drive slots... I've got a lot more than 4 external drives, so it's a wash at the worst.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Misa
I'll wait till someone does a tear-down of it before considering buying it though. This is pretty much the G4 cube revived as a cylinder. It's an art piece, but it lacks rack-mountability and as far as we know, GPU upgrade ability.

I kinda expect Apple did this, and will later go "oh look, not many people buy Mac Pros, let's discontinue it",

Not many people bought XServes so they discontinued them. Apple recognizes who their market is. They tried to serve people who really wanted it to be "rackable", and there just weren't enough buyers.

I think it's unfair to call this an art piece, though. It is lovely, yes, but it's form is a direct result of its function. There are two things a case does: hold components and manage heat and airflow. Any box can hold the components, that's trivial.

This is a radical solution to the heat management problem... and a huge leap forward in that regard. They did it for functionality, not for the form, the form is just secondary.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wizard69
Probably the same idiots that panned the FCP update. Which by the way might sell a lot of these machines once they optimize FCP for the new Mac Pro.

As someone who edits a lot of video, FCPX is a huge leap forward. But it works differently. I learn new things quickly and loved it... I think a lot of people have to be trained before they can really do anything.... you change the software and suddenly they can't do anything because their training is obsolete.

These "professionals" are the ones who complained about FCPX. Anyone who actually edits loves it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 65C816
How do you rackmount these?!

The XServe has been discontinued. There's no money in competing in the cheap server market.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Can't wait for iFixit to review it and give it a −27 on their "Repairability Scale".

They probably will and it will be hilarious because looking at the internals it's pretty repairable. (seems everything is held in with screws and the top just rotates off.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris Muir

The new Mac Pro design seems to take full advantage of the chimney effect. It should move a fair amount of air all by itself, before the fan gets involved. (and I love that Apple even designed the fan here)

It really is a marvelous design. One big fan can move a volume of air with slower RPMs, meaning less nose, and all the processing units sharing one massive heat sink is just lovely.

The new design is still dual processor (6 cores each), just like the old design. HyperThreads will double the max. number of active threads to 24 total per complete system.

Dual-processor capable Sandy Bridge Xeons with 8 cores have been available for months already, to get 32 threads per system. 8 and 16 DIMM slot motherboards for these chips are commonplace, compared to just 4 slots in the new Mac Pro.

I don't know I have been trying to get info on Xeons, I got it twisted with the chips that allows 4 Processors on board I think I don't know, been up all night, misread maybe. So it's DUAL PROC? wow I didn't see that, I could have swore I read about 12-core haswell or something, whatever maybe not, I don't know, but I didn't see how you could put two in the Cylinder? on the Apple site breakdown... we will see I suppose... I could have swore in the conference he said has Haswell, but I don't know

According to Fudzilla, the Haswell-E will have from 12 to 16 cores, a TDP of 130 W, and support for DDR4 memory that promises to deliver exponentially more bandwidth than previous generations of processors.